Rating: 
Summary: Rare instance where the movie is better
Review: I saw the movie before reading the book. I loved the movie with its interesting characters, adventures, and the really charming small New England college town setting. I bought the book because I hoped it would pick up where the movie left off. The first part tracks the movie almost exactly, and provides some more on the background and thoughts of Grady Tripp. Unfortunately, the book veers off to Tripp's estranged wife's family and farmhouse, and the book began to completely suck at that point. I couldn't get through this part. The movie took the quirky-buddy-adventure aspects of the book and emphasized those, to its merit. It wisely cut out the hundred or so pages at the farmhouse. Tripp's wife's Jewish-Korean family, living in a virtually abandoned town, reads like an extremely dull absurdist portrait of small-town life. Tripp's father-in-law, a crusty old hermit who sits around reading books on metallurgy or some similarly useless topic, is supposed to be eccentric and charming, but it's just all unutterably dull. Tripp minces around his wife but doesn't approach her, and it was smart for the filmmakers to remove her entirely as a character. I couldn't wait for Tripp and Leer to return to their adventures, but they remained in this stagnant spot for much too long. I abandoned the book about halfway through.
Rating: 
Summary: One of last year's best
Review: I saw this movie 3 times in the theatre and couldn't wait to buy the DVD when it came out. It is definitely a movie with a dark sense of humor but thats what makes it so great. It gets better and you pick up more jokes each time you watch it. It was one of my favorites for last year and has an outstanding cast with very unique characters.
Rating:
Summary: Fantastic Reading
Review: This is writing at its best, the way that writing should be. Chabon's novel is completely engaging from the first page until the last. Anyone who enjoys reading well written literature will love this book. I will read anything and everything this man writes.
Rating:
Summary: every detail . . .
Review: i love to read because i love the written word. michael chabon includes so many great details that other writers might leave out. wonder boys has a great plot, although slow at first is well worth sticking with. my only suggestion: read the book before the movie or the book has the potential to bore you to death if you let it. even if you have already seen the movie do not toss the book aside, it fills in so many blank spaces and enhances the movies . . . even the part with the coat.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent book
Review: Funnier and more poignant than Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Still, I wish amazon would let me award 4.5 stars. It's not perfect narrative, and always seemed to be running over fairly familiar literary ground. Chabon will be a mega-star rising out of the midlist if he can start writing about some settings other than college
Rating: 
Summary: If you liked the movie, you'll love the book
Review: In a reversal of my usual routine, I saw "Wonder Boys" the film before I read the book. I thoroughly enjoyed the film, and I loved the book. The book follows the travails of Grady Tripp, an overweight, aging college English professor who wrote the great American novel--and who has been totally unable to finish his follow-up book, which amounts to over 2 thousand pages at the beginning of the novel. But, as the reader shortly finds out, this is just the beginning of Grady's problems. In the space of one long weekend during his college's WordFest writer's festival, he loses his wife, learns that his lover is pregnant, copes with his sexually ambiguous and troubled editor, and learns the truth about the life and talent of one of his students. The novel is briskly paced and plotted, and the minute events in Grady's life are alternately funny and pathetic. You see Grady growing in sincerity and realization throughout the novel, and it's a pleasure to watch this dissolute but essentially good-hearted man fall and then rise again due to his change in priorities. This is a funny, touching, expert piece of writing. Chabon just won the Pulitzer for his most recent novel, and this book clearly demonstrates his talent. I highly recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: quintessential pothead narrator
Review: Sad to say, I saw the movie first -- and a fine movie it was (especially given the usual dreck that -- well, you know) -- but I wish I'd read the book first, because there is so much more to it, and the bumbling ursine largishness of the narrator, so central to the book, is something of which Michael Douglas (even given how much he stepped out of character for the film) is probably incapable. The writing is hysterically funny in places, and the end is especially well-wrought -- without ever moralizing, Chabon replicates the mathematics of loss at the root of our incipient Western fatalism -- by sacrificing without really sacrificing, without ever really changing through sacrifice, Grady opens himself up to life; never having been particularly happy/unhappy before, he is not happy until enough is taken from him that he can stop endlessly weighing the possibilities against one another, accept what he has, and live with it. No rocket science per se, but Chabon's genius is that he does it without ever climbing up on some twice-removed, first-person-singular narrative high-horse. Nor to forget that it's a very, very funny read.
Rating: 
Summary: entertaining but not memorable
Review: I loved this book for the first 100 pages. The characters are hilarious. But then, they became predictable and I stopped reading. I'm disappointed that what started as such a great premise turned out to be something I didn't care to finish.
Rating: 
Summary: a wordy, uninteresting "WordFest"
Review: Someone has to balance the surfeit of obsequious praise lavished on this pretentiously written book, so I'm obliging. Chabon even uses words that are not in the dictionary, e.g., deinotherian. I realized halfway through the novel that I cared not a whit for any of the dissolute characters or what happened to them. I originally thought I would read the book then rent the film to see the characters rendered alive. To endure their various travails once more is too much for moi.
Rating:
Summary: A wonderful book
Review: This is one of those rare books in which subtle humor works better than comic hijinks. Chabon obviously has a talent for creating deep, meaningful characters and it shows here. While reading this book, you can feel the desperation that Grady Tripp feels or the apathy and confusion of James Leer. The story also moves along at a steady clip. The humor in this book is not so much in the actions of te characters, but the situations they find themselves in. Overall, a great effort by Chabon.
| 
